Today’s post has less to do with Cloud than it has to do with how technology in general is changing things. Those of you who have the joy of putting up with me in real life know that I do a lot of work with various musicians, and so following the music industry trends as they relate to cloud has been a hobby of mine.

When I started doing social media for the music industry, back in ‘94 when the internet came from a combination of MS Publisher, Notepad and a Compuserve email address (all numerical!) things were very different. Most fans barely had the Internet, and social media really didn’t exist. Everything was created from the ground up and if you had a website and email you were set.

Flash forward to today and social media is pervasive in everything. Not only do you need a website that can attract and retain followers, but you must also be able to communicate consistently across multiple platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, SoundCloud on desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones. But to do this piecemeal is impossible, there is a requirement for an integrated tool to create a unified message across all kinds of media.

Right now I am working with a friend to set up such a social media system, and have been busy evaluating new solutions to help make it easy. One really cool solution I came across is from Oracle and their new acquisition Vitrue. Not only does it allow for the creation of social media content, but it has extensive analytics to make it easy to prove ROI. Even better is that since it is a full cloud offering, they have the ability to offer the solution affordably to marketing and social media firms of all sizes. Social media is a pain for many organizations, and marketing teams spend more time defending the need for these types of tools than actually getting to use them. The problem is that the new rules of marketing will be based on social media, and so if you still have your doubts, it’s time to do your research.

Marketing without analytics is useless, it’s just putting out messages without listening to how they are received. Cloud is ushering in Big Data Analytics which will help create more information than ever before. The question is how do you plan to use it.

For more information, plus a great blog on how social media is affecting marketing, visit http://www.vitrue.com/blog/